Directly, ALM offers significant value to a company, but ALM also enhances other enterprise systems, such as product lifecycle management (PLM), by enabling the sharing of product information across engineering disciplines.

Requirements Engineering

Requirements are often managed in Word or Excel files, disconnected from product design data, testing, and the rest of the product development team. This leads to incomplete and inaccurate requirements, poor communication of customer requirements across engineering disciplines, difficulty in validating that product designs meet customer needs and an inability to trace product designs back to requirements. Individually or combined, these symptoms often lead to rework, ineffective change management and difficulty implementing product reuse strategies.

Requirements Engineering from PTC provides a single source of truth for requirements documents supporting revision history, library services, workflow and routing, document templates, change notification, traceability and reuse. Collaboration capabilities provide secure, globally accessible, role-based workspaces to share and collaborate on requirements at any point in the process.

Global Software Development

With the increased amount of software in products, companies struggle with visibility to release readiness and handling the exponential growth in product variants while maintaining high quality. Software development is often disconnected from the rest of product development and is not included in design reviews until late in the process. PTC Global Software Development Solution, an ALM solution optimized for product engineering, orchestrates all software development processes and manages all engineering artifacts, including requirements, system models, source code, and test, ensuring comprehensive lifecycle traceability.

System Requirements and Validation

Engineering executives are increasingly challenged to accelerate the delivery of innovative products and manage the proliferation of product variants with fewer resources, while improving quality. The only way to overcome these challenges is through a comprehensive, multidisciplinary (i.e. hardware and software) approach that drives collaboration in the design of complex systems.

The exponential growth of software in products has only magnified the complexity. Increased complexity requires an iterative, closed-loop process with system-level requirements flow-down and granular traceability – from system requirements through design and test. The optimal system architecture can be developed through iterative modeling and simulation. When iteration is fostered early in the system design process, collaboration becomes more effective, significantly reducing late lifecycle rework. Time to market is shortened, quality improved, and costs reduced.